The Queen broke her silence Sunday about the potential break-up of the United Kingdom by warning Scots to think “very carefully about the future” before casting their votes in the independence referendum.

With the contest on a knife edge, the monarch made a hugely significant intervention by stating that she hoped Scots would consider closely what their “important” votes would mean.

Buckingham Palace insiders insisted her remarks were politically neutral but they were being viewed last night as the clearest sign yet that she hopes for a No vote on Thursday.

It seems a fair assumption those closest to the border have most interest in maintaining the 307-year-old union. And it seems even more likely Sir Walter Scott, the world’s first best-selling author would approve the folk of his beloved Borders would side with the union.

Scott’s renaissance in popularity has seen both “Yes” and “No” sides claiming him as their own. He was undoubtedly a patriot and a unionist.

Yet no-one visiting Abbotsford, his baronial country house in the rolling hills of the Scottish borders, can be left in any doubt he was a committed Tory, who would have shunned the socialists leading the Yes charge.

He would probably have broken Marie Antoinette’s clock and the silver urn gifted by Lord Byron with Rob Roy’s broadsword­, all on display in Abbotsford, rather than endorsed the chippy independence movement led by Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister.

“I don’t think he would have liked what he saw in the temper of the nationalists,” said Allan Massie, the renowned author and journalist, who lives in nearby Selkirk.

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“A lot of his novels were about reconciliation and I don’t think he’d have liked the way the nationalists are dividing Scots, as well as dividing us from the English.”

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Scott’s views are fundamental to any explanation of how the Scots arrived at the brink of independence after 307 years.

“Scott’s achievement was that he helped create for Scotland a distinctive identity — ­yes, based on spurious associations with tartan, ­but one comfortably Scottish within the union and different from the English,” said Mr. Massie.

After the Jacobite rebellions in the mid-18th century, the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith became entrenched in the union as “North Britons” — ­“revealing the innate superiority of the Scots by out-Englishing the English,” in the words of author James Buchan.

Scott put an end to the North Briton identity and gave birth to a distinct Scottish cultural, if not political, nationalism.

He was party to the belief Scotland had entered a profitable union with England,­ even forming his own militia to suppress rebellion against the status quo.

But the writer was also a proud patriot who worried Scotland’s sense of itself was disappearing. As such, he sought to immortalize the country’s past in many of the 27 novels of the Waverley series that made him revered at home and abroad.

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To give some sense of his popularity, he earned 10 times more from Waverley in its first year in print, than Jane Austen did from Pride and Prejudice in her entire lifetime.

Scott’s work helped define popular notions and stereotypes about Scotland. He virtually invented clan tartans in the stage-managed trip to Edinburgh by King George IV in 1822 he organized.

He promoted the view the union allowed Scotland to punch above its weight, with Scots becoming the champion empire builders. The warm feeling offered by “the blanket of Britishness,” in the words of popular historian Neil Oliver, carried through both world wars and the immediate aftermath, with the advent of the National Health Service.

But the decline of Scotland’s heavy industry in the post-war years presaged an erosion of the ties that bound the union together.

Clydeside, the beating heart of the Scottish nation, produced 30% of the world’s ships in 1950; yet just 10 years later this was down to 5%. This spiral of decline was repeated in the mining and steel sectors, and sparked the birth of political nationalism.

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In 1967, the Scottish National Party elected its first MP and the discovery of “black gold” in the North Sea gave the nationalists the chance to promise a bright new future as an independent country. By 1974, the SNP had 11 MPs and were claiming “It’s Scotland’s Oil.”

When the Conservative Margaret Thatcher arrived on the political scene like a comet, it became apparent the government subsidies that sustained much of Scotland’s heavy industry were on borrowed time.

England voted Tory in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Scotland backed Labour, yet got Mrs. Thatcher’s harsh medicine of de-industrialization and the poll tax. Between 1979 and 1981, Scotland lost a fifth of its workforce and Scottish voters have never forgiven the Conservatives.

When Tony Blair’s Labour delivered on its promise of a referendum on a devolved Scottish parliament —­ a vote that produced a solid 74% in favour —­ the expectation was nationalism had had its day.

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As George Robertson, a former Labour defence minister, famously said, devolution would kill the independence movement “stone dead.”

But, with the Tories a toxic option for many voters, the Edinburgh parliament allowed the SNP to become the natural governing alternative to Labour. Mr. Blair’s foreign adventurism and embrace of the markets went down badly north of the border. The result was the SNP’s victory in Scotland’s 2011 election and the fulfillment of a campaign commitment to hold another referendum.

If Mr. Salmond does become the father of a new nation later this week, he should give thanks to the man who created the sense of a nation.

As Mr. Massie put it, “Scott persuaded Lowland Scots to accept what their grandfathers regarded as the mark of a thief [tartan] and created a coherent Scottish identity within the union.”